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I remember some years back on Reddit there a change to what the default subs were. Suddenly my reddit frontpage was full of /r/aww and a lot of incredibly low effort content. From then on it was necessary to show only subs I subscribe to. I like memes as much as the next person, but in moderation.

I'm not worried and don't see a big problem if there are some subreddits/communities with memes and low effort content.

In the discussion of size. I subbed to the classicalmusic sub. Right now there is an equivalent in the fediverse I think but it's quite dead. Just having one community for all types of music isn't really appealing. I don't want to go through 1000s of popmusic post to find two about classical. This example of mine with classicalmusic transfers well to other topic. I started using a distro of Linux on my computer and want to connect with others also using Linux. For all these niche interest size is important.

Then as for joining. I won't say it's complicated to sign up, but there is an extra hurdle in a way with how it's a lot to take in about how the fediverse is working. Many people will join, but it requires slightly more effort still than many other social places around the internet.

Communities naturally change as they grow. I'm sure I'm not the only one who can remember being able to read every single Tweet as the scrolled by on the Twitter homepage, before it became necessary to pick and choose who to follow. Or who watched popular BBS boards fission as the load got too high.

The challenge is to have healthy growth. Thoughtful moderation goes a long way (unless you're looking for a free-for-all environment, which some people are). Welcoming and engaging people who you want to encourage to set the tone helps too. I suspect the fact that in the Fediverse you can "vote with your feet" and switch servers without losing access to previous discussions may also help to limit the spread of toxicity.

Sure, many Reddit users will pile onto to our wonderful little place probably overloading it.

Over time I think, traffic and user activity will spread out across the lemmyverse which I believe will be a net-positive. Ideally, low-effort memes and reposts will be kept in separate communities from thoughtful discussion.

So one of the defenses we have against this is the federated nature of lemmy. It's not "Lemmy" that you join. It's an instance run by some people you hopefully have found to align with your values. That instance does not need to grow large on its own for the whole network to be strong and you can maintain moderation in the instance by limiting then number of members joining. This doesn't weaken Lemmy, there are other instances that denied applicants can go to and they can all interact. Think of it like a bus service where if one bus is too full, you can just catch the next one. Except the next bus is already there waiting for you. It may just be enough of a disruption to stop a hivemind from moving in and taking over entirely, especially if instances are founded on a strong sense of culture. Beehaw certainly has its own culture compared to other instances and that's a great thing to hold on to when lot's of people show up and want things to work here exactly how they worked elsewhere.

Edit: We don't WANT to host the mass exodus from reddit. But if during that exodus a bunch of people who find they like our way of doing things better happen to join us then that's amazing.